Bjorn Quiring. Shakespeare's Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama. Trans. Michael Winkler and Bjorn Quiring. Discourses of Law. New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. ix + 268. $145.00. For Bjorn Quiring's Shakespeare's Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama, curses are not simply the stuff of Lear's theatrical howls or Margaret's vituperative pronouncements. Rather, Quiring aligns the curse with Derrida's concept of the "supplement," defining it as that which "can complement and represent the law, but also threatens to dissolve and replace it" (2). This foundation leads him to posit that curses "mark the point where absolute power and complete impotence blend and become indistinguishable: the curse is a sovereign speech act that demonstrates the impossibility of sovereign speech acts" (3). In post-Reformation England, curses function as vestiges of a defunct Catholic Church, paradoxically illegitimate yet potent insofar as they integrate themselves into other institutions that include theatre and law. Early modern theatre has a particular affinity for performances of curses such that, as Quiring contends, "the ritual of execration might be seen as a dark precursor of theater itself" (14). To unpack all that is contained within a curse, then, is to learn something of early modern theatre. And in his attention to juristic themes in his selected plays, Quiring traces the foundations of Western law to the curse as well. Though anchored to an early modern context, the study ultimately aims to remedy the absence of scholarship regarding the nature of the curse in the modern era, arguing that traces of the curse persist in contemporary speech acts. Quiring's study brings an ambitious assemblage of literary, juridical, religious, theological, theoretical, and political sources to bear on three of Shakespeare's royal plays--Richard III, King John, and King Lear--in three chapters of varying length. With a new historicist methodology, Quiring interprets episodes of cursing as "ideal index fossils of a secularization overpowered by its mythic latencies" (17). Although the chapters themselves are organized from Shakespeare's early to later plays, the project also features retrograde movement through time as it begins with the proximate present of Richard III and concludes with King Lears ancient Britain. For Quiring, this structure is purposeful, a subtle addition to an argument concerning the curses peculiar temporality in which the past and the future collapse into each other. Yet the chapter organization, interrupted by numerous subsections, sometimes obscures the overall argument, although there is no shortage of refreshing analysis and incisive claims. Even for scholars intimate with the plays, Quiring's careful readings are as pleasurable as they are erudite. After a generous orientation to his theoretical scaffolding, Quiring turns his attention to Richard III and to analogs of the curse (e.g., excommunication, oath, prophecy) in the first chapter, which comprises nearly half of the book. Even as he catalogs these analogs in detail, the chapter is preoccupied with the question of irony, and Richard himself is read as emblematic of the phenomenon. Commencing the play as the malevolent yet captivating chameleon, Richard deploys irony to consolidate his power but, by its end, finds himself subject to the irony he had once so skillfully wielded. "Only the ironic structure of representation itself is truly sovereign" (125), Quiring concludes, and what Shakespearean theatre reveals is the aporetic structure of the curse, "a sovereign irony that acknowledges the autonomous field of representation, defined by the endless sliding of the signifier, as the true sovereign" (142). Put simply, Richard III demonstrates that sovereign irony, characterized by the infinite play of meaning-making, animates the early modern curse. Interpreting King John as a "display of hollowness" in which concepts such as history and sovereignty are emptied of their significance (163), Quiring begins his brief second chapter. …

中文翻译：

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莎士比亚的诅咒：比约恩·奎林 (Björn Quiring) 的早期现代皇家戏剧中仪式排斥的困境

比约恩·奎林。莎士比亚的诅咒：早期现代皇家戏剧中仪式排斥的困境。翻译 迈克尔·温克勒和比约恩·奎林。法律话语。纽约：劳特利奇，2014 年。Pp。ix + 268。145.00 美元。对于比约恩·奎林 (Bjorn Quiring) 的莎士比亚诅咒：早期现代皇家戏剧中仪式排斥的绝境，诅咒不仅仅是李尔戏剧性的嚎叫或玛格丽特的谩骂。相反，奎林将诅咒与德里达的“补充”概念保持一致，将其定义为“可以补充和代表法律，但也威胁要解散和取代它”（2）。这个基础使他假设诅咒“标志着绝对权力和完全无能混合并变得无法区分的点：该研究最终旨在弥补现代关于诅咒性质的学术研究的缺失，认为诅咒的痕迹在当代言语行为中持续存在。奎林的研究将文学、司法、宗教、神学、理论和政治资源的雄心勃勃的组合用于莎士比亚的三部皇家戏剧——理查德三世、约翰王和李尔王——分为三章，长度各不相同。奎林用一种新的历史主义方法论将诅咒的情节解释为“被其神话潜伏期压倒的世俗化的理想指标化石”（17）。虽然章节本身是从莎士比亚的早期戏剧到后期的戏剧组织的，该项目还以穿越时空的逆行运动为特色，从最近出现的理查三世开始，到古代英国的李尔王结束。对于奎林来说，这种结构是有目的的，是对过去和未来相互崩溃的诅咒特殊时间性的争论的微妙补充。然而，章节组织被无数小节打断，有时会掩盖整个论点，尽管不乏令人耳目一新的分析和精辟的主张。即使对于熟悉这些戏剧的学者来说，奎林的仔细阅读也同样令人愉快，而且博学。在对他的理论框架进行了慷慨的定位之后，奎林将注意力转向了理查三世和第一章中诅咒的类似物（例如，逐出教会、誓言、预言），这几乎占了本书的一半。即使他详细地对这些类似物进行了编目，这一章仍然专注于讽刺问题，而理查德本人则被视为这种现象的象征。以恶毒而迷人的变色龙的身份开始这出戏，理查德运用讽刺来巩固自己的力量，但在结束时，他发现自己受到了他曾经如此巧妙地运用的讽刺的影响。“只有再现的讽刺结构本身才是真正的至高无上的”（125），奎林总结道，莎士比亚戏剧揭示的是诅咒的无孔结构，“一种至高无上的讽刺，承认再现的自主领域，由无休止的滑动定义。能指，作为真正的主权者”（142）。简而言之，理查三世展示了至高无上的讽刺，以意义创造的无限游戏为特征，为早期现代诅咒注入了活力。奎林将约翰王解释为“空虚的展示”，其中历史和主权等概念的意义都被清空了 (163)，奎林开始了他简短的第二章。…